Spreadsheets have become the life blood of many organizations. Spreadsheets are used to track inventory and resources, order goods and services, hire or contract resources, plan business activity, forecast business activity, determine business financials, and the like. However, some spreadsheet operations and some data integration can be overly complex and difficult to achieve with the interfaces that are available with spreadsheets.
For example, maintaining state associated with data of cells embedded within a spreadsheet is not easily achieved because to do so requires developing complex and lengthy formulas for each cell where there is a desire to track state changes. Additionally, spreadsheets generally provide data in generic formats and rely on external services to interpret and translate those generic formats in order to interface with the spreadsheets and their data. As a result, newly added external services have to include separate translation features for each different type of spreadsheet data for which the services may desire to integrate with.